1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to security systems for data and, more particularly, to security systems that protect data in an inter/intra enterprise environment.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet is the fastest growing telecommunications medium in history. This growth and the easy access it affords have significantly enhanced the opportunity to use advanced information technology for both the public and private sectors. It provides unprecedented opportunities for interaction and data sharing among businesses and individuals. However, the advantages provided by the Internet come with a significantly greater element of risk to the confidentiality and integrity of information. The Internet is an open, public and international network of interconnected computers and electronic devices. Without proper security means, an unauthorized person or machine may intercept any information traveling across the Internet and even get access to proprietary information stored in computers that interconnect to the Internet, but are otherwise generally inaccessible by the public.
There are many efforts in progress aimed at protecting proprietary information traveling across the Internet and controlling access to computers carrying the proprietary information. Cryptography allows people to carry over the confidence found in the physical world to the electronic world, thus allowing people to do business electronically without worries of deceit and deception. Every day hundreds of thousands of people interact electronically, whether it is through e-mail, e-commerce (business conducted over the Internet), ATM machines, or cellular phones. The perpetual increase of information transmitted electronically has lead to an increased reliance on cryptography.
One of the ongoing efforts in protecting the proprietary information traveling across the Internet is to use one or more cryptographic techniques to secure a private communication session between two communicating computers on the Internet. The cryptographic techniques provide a way to transmit information across an unsecure communication channel without disclosing the contents of the information to anyone eavesdropping on the communication channel. Using an encryption process is a cryptographic technique whereby one party can protect the contents of the data in transit from access by an unauthorized third party, yet the intended party can read the data using a corresponding decryption process.
A firewall is another security measure that protects the resources of a private network from users of other networks. However, it has been reported that many unauthorized accesses to proprietary information occur from the inside, as opposed to from the outside. An example of someone gaining unauthorized access from the inside is when restricted or proprietary information is accessed by someone within an organization who is not supposed to do so. Due to the open nature of the Internet, contractual information, customer data, executive communications, product specifications, and a host of other confidential and proprietary intellectual property remain available and vulnerable to improper access and usage by unauthorized users within or outside a supposedly protected perimeter.
Many businesses and organizations have been looking for effective ways to protect their proprietary information. Typically, businesses and organizations have deployed firewalls, Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) to provide protection. Unfortunately, these various security means have been proven insufficient to reliably protect proprietary information residing on private networks. For example, depending on passwords to access sensitive documents from within often causes security breaches when the password of a few characters long is leaked or detected. Consequently, various cryptographic means are deployed to provide restricted access to electronic data in security systems.
Various security criteria, such as encryption or decryption keys, are often used to facilitate the restricted access in the security systems. However, prolonged use of the security criteria, if not updated, can impose threats to the security of the protected data. While periodic updates to keys can help preserve security, the generation and distribution of key (such as in a network-based system) is a significant burden to system resources. When the system maintains a large number of keys for numerous file and users, the demand of system resources is even more taxing. Therefore, there is a need to provide more effective ways to utilize the security criteria (e.g. the keys) for security systems to secure and protect resources.